• AverageEarthling@feddit.online
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    1 day ago

    I only buy books from thriftbooks. Haven’t seen any slop books there yet. And there’s just something about a well worn book. They are just more fun to read.

  • markstos@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    How soon until Amazon buys one of each, prints them; ships them to a different warehouse, rips the pages out and scans them back in?

    • a1studmuffin@aussie.zone
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      2 days ago

      I swear this is the real reason AI companies are concerned about watermarking - not for the public good, but so they can keep their model training inputs clean.

  • Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org
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    2 days ago

    So these things are actually sold in recognizable numbers? smh

    A philosopher has once said that you should only read books that are >100 years old.

  • KssioAug@piefed.zip
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    2 days ago

    If I had to guess, most of these ‘books’ are some kink bullshit. Ever since I looked for the rankings in the Kindle section, it was flooded by books with men or women stripping on the cover and some random erotic titles. Among them some rare exceptions (and most of these were some cheap self-help stuff).

    That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised this is what’s being actually affected. I can’t see the actual data or content of the article though, because it requires me to subscribe and I definitely won’t.

    • T156@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Copycats might also be an issue. I remember that when Douglas Wreden published his book, he had to deal with numerous AI-generated copycats popping up one after the other, using his name and face, trying to trick people into buying their book, because his had become popular.

    • solrize@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      I get the impression that most kindle books are sold (well rented) by subscription, i.e. all you can read for a fixed monthly fee, so a subscriber downloading an AI book or other crap doesn’t pay any increment to do so. IDK how the revenues are divided up.

      • architect@thelemmy.club
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        2 days ago

        You don’t get paid until the reader reads x amount of pages of the book.

        I sell way way more than through that subscription bs. I removed my book from it. It keeps the author on Amazon.

  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    Well duh. Also real authors are flooding Amazon with crap too. Have people not been paying attention?

    • Rothe@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      Before AI they offered a lot of books which were just printed wikipedia articles.

      However AI books massively increases the problem, because they can be created by the thousands, millions even, in seconds by any grifter out there, and there are a lot of grifters.

      Any sort of argument of “it has always been bad” (and it has), are not very constructive, because the current situation enhances the shittification of the internet on a scale that was impossible before. It is an unprecedented situation.

      • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        Yeah it really is. So was Amazon bulk printing pulp.

        Its almost like maybe amazon wasn’t the place to get random books.

    • KssioAug@piefed.zip
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      2 days ago

      Exactly what I wonder. I have a list of 110 (and growing) books I want to read, all of them written by human beings, and I discover something new all the time. There’s no way I will buy a random book on Amazon, be it from AI or by some author I’ve never heard anything about.

    • BJW@lemmus.org
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      1 day ago

      People with metal teeth! They can bite through this, they can bite through that…

      They can even bite through the main power conduit!

  • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I wasn’t buying books from Amazon. I’m not gonna start now. Certainly not going to start buying AI slop “books”.